In an interview with DW, Dr. Drauzio Varella talks about Amazon and what he learned in the region who is the subject of his new book. Since 1992, the Amazon has been part of the routine of the famous Brazilian doctor Drauzio Varella. More specifically the Rio Negro basin. Since then, he claims to have undertaken about 150 trips to the Region, coordinating a pharmacological research project within the School of Nature program, an initiative at the University of Paulista (UNIP).
“The first time [que lá estive] I was really dazzled. And I feel guilty, because at that time I already knew many countries and I still didn’t know the Amazon carefully, “he says.
Travels in the region gave a book The Sense of Water: Stories of Rio Negro, who will come out on Wednesday (02/04) by Compania das letras. Like the Daily Travel Classics, the work brings together stories collected and lived by the charismatic doctor in its incursions for the most important forest on the planet, highlighting not only natural landscapes, but in particular the human characters that make up the threatened bioma.
Drauzio Varella became a celebrity in Brazil not only for her qualities as an oncologist, but for the ease of communication. With an easy, attentive and convenient language, it is one of the main diffusion of medical information in the country, with frames and constant apparitions in TV, radio and internet programs.
At 81, Varella tells the relationship that continues to visit Amazon at least three times a year – there have been moments when the trips occurred on average one per month. Since it is clear in the tasty narrative of the book, this presence has transformed it not only into a connoisseur of that region, but also in a person who guides and dialogues with many rivers, of which he knows the name, family and many causes.
The doctor gave an interview to DW last Friday, from his residence in San Paolo, from the video call. He only made a requirement: he was not called the Lord, but simply treated by you.
DW: In these over 30 years of travel to the Amazon, what were the main transformations? What has distinguished himself for you in 1992 and which one is now different?
Drauzio Varella: what brought me to these frequent trips was this research project. The first time I was dazzled. Really, feel guilty. At this point I already knew many countries and I did not know the Amazon closely. I saw that river … look, what a dazzle! European rivers seem flows near the Amazonian rivers. It is a type of landscape that has a impact on our eyes, a very strong image.
Over the years, this has changed. I was more selective, my gaze became more detailed. It is so beautiful that you accepted, you have no eyes for nothing else. Over time, look more the reflections of the river, the forest, the composition of the forest. This thing about biodiversity is visible, not theory.
When you look more, the more you look at your gaze, the more beauties you find. And this therefore faces the inhabitants of the region, the people, the river, the natives. You start wanting to understand their story, where these people come from. When the Portuguese arrived, there were already millions in Brazil.
Citi cell phones, which begin there was no one and now every child, every person, is using, everyone looks at the screen. As a doctor, do you think this offensive use is an epidemic disease?
I don’t know if we could call this disease. I’m a little cautious for this term. To give an example: measuring your pressure and you gave 14 for 10. Technically, you have hypertension. But I can’t say that you are sick. I can say that you have a condition, that it is hypertension, that it can become a disease. You will be sick when you have a myocardial infarction, how much you have kidney failure.
But I would say that this is a new condition, a devastating condition, not only here in the big cities but there [na Amazônia] Also. Because this technology has come without us preparing for her. Suddenly he fell and spread at an impressive speed. So you see those populations that have lived a completely different reality from this and this gives a bad impression, because they leave the universe in which they lived and live in the universe of social networks.
If social networks have problems for people who have grown up in large cities, they have a great impact on the formation of our children, teenagers and ourselves, adults, imagine in the populations who lived in distant communities and suddenly migrate to the city that already have a certain urban culture, culture not always in the good feeling of culture. This is a much greater impact.
That is: the use of the mobile phone is a condition, but are the consequences the “diseases” that appear?
Without a doubt. Do you think you have a fit? The suicide rate between the indigenous people who live in their communities are no studies, at least I know, it is certainly low. They migrate to the cities and then the children begin to kill themselves at 13, 14, 15 years old. It doesn’t have the slightest sense, right? Something happens that brings these children … I think it is the loss of identity. When they arrive in the city, they start with the cell phone, the social network and the devil. They are no longer the indigenous people who were. They become nothing. He completely loses his identity.
In his book, in common, almost all the stories bring lessons of wisdom of the simple and wise person, connected to nature. How to know more from them?
Wisdom before life does not depend on intellectual formation. A man, a woman who lives that reality and can understand that the reality she is living has a lot to teach us. In the book I tell the story of, when we had a boat to make collections, he had a toucan indigenous sitting on a tree trunk on the river. He was looking, his eyes lost. Two hours later, when we passed again, it was exactly in the same conditions. One of us asked: what do you do there? He replied: I’m sitting. Which more logical answer could give? We are that there is this thing about “You are not doing anything”, having to do something. We have this pressure to make, move, to build. He was sitting to look at the river, it was what he was doing. This wisdom is very interesting.
His book dialogues with the contemporary production of prominent names among the original peoples, such as the same writer Ailton Krenak. The solution to the evils of nature and the evils of human beings in the return to ancestral knowledge?
I don’t know how to answer. But I think that the abandonment of ancestral knowledge, this philosophy of life impoverishes us.
And the evolution of deforestation? Shock numbers, of course. But in real life is it also evident, visible?
It is visible, yes. Pass through a place, come back five years later and see a deforest part. We have a botanical portion that we study in Baixo Negro, [no entorno do] penultimate tributary before reaching Manaus. See people who bring wood from there. It is such a thing, without very disguise. It is made with a certain discretion, but does not change.
Are you optimistic about this? Does deforestation have a cure?
I think the great misunderstanding here, when we think of the Amazon rainforest, is to think of a wild place, a green carpet or a green hell. You talk to people and then the boy says: when I arrived here, 30 years ago, there was nothing. There was nothing! There was a forest! He knocked, put the cattle and planted a grass there to nourish this cattle. Or soy planted. Now that there is nothing.
At that time there was a lot, there was a huge biodiversity. There was a forest there, the greatest good of nature. But if you do not take into account the fact that the forest is inhabited and this must be part of all thoughts, all public policies in the region is not preserved. Because if we had died in such a place, without food to give to our children and reaches floods there is no fish, without fish, we would also break down. Because between a tree and my son, I don’t even have the choice to do. So, as long as we don’t think about it, as long as we have no public policies that survive these populations, forget.
Forget it, because it will not be possible. In this region in which we go [fazer as pesquisas] He had an Angelin [espécie de árvore] marvelous. It should be 30 meters or higher. And I’ve always crossed and found something extraordinary. One day I passed and it wasn’t. Then I spoke with a man who lived there and he: Oh, I changed a wardrobe, I needed and I had no money to buy. He exchanged a wonder of nature like that tree with a wardrobe that I saw that I could buy for him. But I never thought of buying. I thought [a árvore] He was close to his home and would have preserved. Why should it preserve?
Source: Terra
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